


Another Life Over

by Kay (comebackid)



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Immortality, Reincarnation, i hurt while i write, immortal adora, longing and searching and pain, lots of pain, soft catradora - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:07:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24934252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/comebackid/pseuds/Kay
Summary: Adora wished she would never lose her best friend but the stars aren't the most reliable in wishes
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 46





	Another Life Over

**Author's Note:**

> idk bro... I ache, in my heart I ache so deep and I think reincarnation is the most painful trope. I might add more chapters later but for now this is all thank you

It was too early for the sun to be awake yet, she was wrapped in a blanket so soft, so large it covered her little body three times over and she sat there, tiny head poking out of the covers watching the sky. It was her birthday, she had turned eight a few hours ago and she knew something had shifted. Every birthday, every time the stars rain from the sky she feels something shift. She watches the sun come up and it lights up her face, chubby cheeks, and a pink nose.

“Adora, what are you doing awake child?” came a cry of indignation and she launched herself into the arms of her nanny. The only real mother she’s ever known.

“It happened again mama.” She whispered to the older women, Adora had been calling her mama in their own private moments for as long as the world shifted.

“Did it now dear?” she would ask her, her voice as soft and gentle as her blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She would lay Adora down in her little canopy bed and sit beside her, rubbing her hair. “Catra will be here soon my love, get some sleep.” She would say like she said every birthday and kiss her forehead and Adora would drift to her own beautiful world filled with dreams and shooting stars.

When she woke, she woke to a face just in front of her own. Barely inches away dark brown curls spilling over small clenched shoulders, freckles littered across a face like a constellation of their own kind and eyes that sparkled like the stars that fall. “Good morning sleepyhead.” And Adora would jump and tackle her friend to the floor and she would laugh like there was nothing to worry about, as though this girl pinned under her was all happiness meant and maybe that really was all it was.

Happiness.

“Catra it happened again.”

“Did the stars fall?”

“They fell everywhere and I made a wish.” She said whispering to her friend as though it’s a secret no one could ever know.

“What did you wish for?” Catra asked, her eyes wide with childish curiosity.

“Promise you won’t tell?” Adora would ask her pinky finger curling as she sat atop her friend, she knew she could tell Catra anything. The rules where different for the two of them, you can’t keep secrets from your best friend and Adora knew the stars would understand.

“Pinky swear.” Catra replied twisting her pinky with her captures.

“That you will be mine forever.” Adora would say, not understanding what she was saying. Not knowing just how much the stars where listening.

Catra smiled at her friend and pushed her off, they still had things to do. It was Adora’s birthday, they had to celebrate her eighth birthday. The girls ran out of the room, hand in hand. There was nothing that could stop them, no one that could take the stars from them.

The sirens started two months later, they came in the night before the sun could find her way back to the sky. They rang across their neighborhood, waking a sleeping girl from the safety of her thick blanket. Her mother, her real mother ran through the door and scooped up the little girl in her arms and ran, faster than she had ever moved before. She ran with Adora in her arms down, down, down to a part of their house Adora never knew existed. Adora was eight when she found herself locked in a bomb shelter with her mother and father.

Days passed and she cried, she cried every time the house shook and she clung to her mothers leg when the loud noises outside just would not go away. It was many days before there was a loud knocking on the door and the gruff voice of a man came through, “Hello? Anyone in there?”

Her mother carried her out the same way she carried her in, wrapped in her blanket, and eyes hidden from the bright sun. Her mother carried her out to a broken world, a world that was once pretty houses and green lawns. All that remained was ghosts, ghosts of the buildings and the people that built her world.

It was days still before she thought of her friend. Adora was admitted to a hospital a few cities away from her own and with time her constant shaking was down to a slight tremor and stutter.

“Mama where’s Catra?” She would ask and she would wait and she would wait and wait and wait until the realization would set in and the tears would begin to flow and the eight year old who felt the world shift would know what it meant to die.

They buried her a month later. They buried her on the beach, far away from the public eye on a piece of private property they buried her. Not a body, there was no body left, nothing to be salvaged but a very pretty dress. A small blue dress perfect for an eight year old, a small blue dress that matched Adora’s own perfectly. It was to be Catra’s birthday gift but they buried it in a small grave, perfect for an eight year old.

Adora moved away, with her mama and papa they moved to the country side to live with some cousins but the tremors never stopped. It was years until Adora found the courage to leave, she had nothing left at that little house with the little people and their little dreams. When the girl was twenty one she packed up whatever she had in three suitcases and left her home. A home that hasn’t felt like one in many years.

She traveled west to a city that was blooming, blooming in soot and smoke but blooming all the same. When she reached the city she threw out the letters to friends in high places and walked into the first bar she could find.

“Can you give me a job ma’am?” Adora asked, not daring to put her suitcases down.

“What good’l that do me?” the lady behind the counter would ask, not bothering to look at her yet.

“I can sing ma’am and I can clean and pour and I can sure as hell look pretty while doing it.” Adora said, smiling wide. Her eyes wide with desperation. There was a silence as the lady studied Adora and her three little cases.

“Two weeks and it’s only cause my usual girls on a break. I’ll see what to do with you then.” The lady would say and send Adora up the stairs to an empty room with nothing but a bed and a table.

She looked around the room and placed the cases down at last, the air in her lungs felt like it was someone else’s and her tremors never really went away but she felt she could start a new in this small bar with an even smaller room.

Two weeks passed and the usual girl returned and Adora held her breath for a week after, waiting for the end of the life she hoped she could build there but it never came. Adora was introduced to the usual girl. Her name was Perfuma, the earth mother she had told Adora. Perfuma had a button nose that scrunched up when she got excited and pretty blonde hair that fell straight like a curtain to cover nasty scars and burns on the left side of her neck. Adora did not ask.

Adora worked and she laughed and she found comfort in the life she had built, she drank herself silly with the girls from the bar and told them tales of her mama and papa. Her father had passed three days after she left but Adora knew nothing of it yet, news traveled slow in the old days. She found a home and people she could laugh with but at night she still shook and her breath got caught in her throat and she felt like she was locked in the shelter all over again. Sometimes Adora would see the little blue dress of strangers children and she would bite back tears. Adora would sit at her window and watch the stars, sometimes she would ask them why they didn’t grant her wish.

A year passed like that, two, three and before anyone realized Adora was twenty four and was watching the sky again. She felt something shift for the first time in sixteen years, she felt something shift and she saw the stars fall to the ground again only this time there were no stars it was the tears that clung to her lashes like water droplets on a spiders web. Adora would blink them away and close her eyes and with each breath she took she wished for sleep to find her before the blue dress and a wish so silly it made her cry did.

Adora cleaned the next morning, the girls at the bar had surprised her with a cupcake new earrings. She nearly cried that morning when she saw them and then she cried alone in her room when she received her mothers letter.

“with love, mama and papa.” She cried for a family she never really belonged to, for a family who cared for her and raised her but she never really found belonging in.

She cleaned the table top and collected the glasses left by the late night visitors. She counted the glasses in her little box when she went crashing down and all of a sudden she was eight years old, looking up at dark curls and stars captured in dull brown eyes.

“I’m so sorry, I wasn’t even looking. God I’ve just ruined your morning haven’t I? Are you okay miss?”

“Y-you’re sitting on me.” Was all Adora could push past her lips and soon enough she was sitting on her knees staring into the eyes of the one that had pushed her to the ground.

“I’m so sorry, are you okay?” Catra asked, her eyes face wrinkled with worry.

“I-… Catra?” Adora choked out, her voice betraying her in unison with her eyes as they filled up and began to spill.

It must have been a mistake, this could not be her friend. She buried her friend sixteen years ago. Her friend was taken in a raid fifteen years ago, her mother told her so. She knew it, she believed it all these years and yet here she was.

“Um… yea? Should I be worried that you know my name stranger?” She asked, raising an eyebrow, clearly freaked out by the crying girl looking as though she was lost in a moving picture.

“I… No Catra? You don’t remember me? What happened to you?” She asked her, not giving the girl time to answer. Adora dropped the box of glasses and gripped the other girls hand, her eyes still spilling over with tears as she drank in the sight of her childhood friend.

Time stopped for her, for them as she stood there on her knees begging for her friend to remember, begging for anything to happen, anything other than the distant, scared look in her eyes.

“I don’t know how you know my name or if this is some kind of sick joke but stay away from me.” She said, ripping her hands out of Adora’s grasp and backing out of the bar. She stopped for a minute at the door to look at the girl, the strange girl hunched over herself on the floor crying and reaching out for her. There was a spark, a small distant memory of laughter and canopy beds before she turned and all but ran out the door.

Adora stayed like that for another fifteen minutes and the other girls did not dare to go near her, she stayed there bent over, closed fists banging against the wooden floor as she cried. She did not know how much sadness was there inside her, how much the loss of her friend had hurt her but the sight of her, the fear and the repulsion she felt when Catra pushed her away was too much for the poor girl to not break.

Finally it was the old lady of the bar who came to get her, she knelt beside her and rubbed her back, petted her hair like her nanny used to do. She crouched low on her knees and said two words to her before getting up and leaving again, “she hesitated.”

It would be four months before Adora saw Catra again, it would be another four months and she learnt to live again, learnt to live without her friend but she couldn’t go back. It’s like they say, once shattered nothing really remains the same and Adora was a girl made of glass and sawdust.

The next time she saw Catra was late into the night and the girl stumbled into the bar, tired dressed in a pantsuit, mascara stain tears streaked across her cheeks. She collapsed onto a stool in front of Adora and she could do nothing but stare. Adora watched the girl as she sobbed into her hands in front of her. Loudly, she cried with so much pain it shattered the pieces Adora was holding together and so she gingerly took her hands in her own. Adora said nothing, she simply held the crying girls hands as she watched her cry.

“I know you.” Was the last thing Catra said before she collapsed, passed out, cold and tired and sad. Life had beat the girl too hard and she had crawled her way back to the only place that felt like home, she had crawled her way back to the strange girl who looked at her with so much longing it just had to be true.

Adora carried the smaller girl up the stairs and to her own bedroom, laid her down and washed her face with a wet cloth. She sat next to her, her own tears plastered against her face as she watched her friend sleep. She looked so peaceful, all dark curls and tanned skin safely settled against the pillow wrapped in worn-out cloth.

“I know you,” Adora repeated the words her friend spoke to her, she repeated them over and over as she brushed her hair with her hand. Catra was dead, she had died when they were but children but here she was, safely tucked in her bed, her lips turned upward like they always did when she relaxed and her freckles. Those beautiful freckles Adora would count unknowingly, those freckles that look like moon dust sprinkled across her face. “Why did you find me again?” she asked the sleeping girl. She didn’t want an answer, content to listen to the quiet snores of a friend she thought forever lost.

Adora fell asleep sitting next to Catra, her hand still tucked in the shorter girls hair and when Catra woke up and felt a sense of peace she hadn’t felt in the longest time, a sense of home that she thought she had lost and she relaxed that is until she realized how unfamiliar her surroundings really were. The girl sat up slowly, inching away from the sleeping blonde that sat beside her and scanned the room she was in. She was still in her clothes from the night before but her shoes were gone, so were her socks and soon enough she felt a splitting headache settle in. She groaned loudly and cursed, a string of well-crafted filth leaving her tongue and settling against Adora’s years.

“Oh you’re awake.” She would say but she would not move. Adora remained seated exactly where she was as though afraid to scare the girl away, afraid that if she moved too suddenly she would jump out of the nearest window so she sat still and tried to speak as softly as possible.

“Where am I?” Catra asked, pulling her legs closer as though she was trying her best to shrink as small as she possibly could and Adora felt her heartbreak right down the middle all over again.

“You had too much to drink last night, came to the bar and collapsed on the floor. You didn’t have any contacts so I let you sleep here. Are you…” she started but hesitated, Adora wasn’t sure what she wanted to know. There were so many questions she had for the girls seated in front of her but she couldn’t throw them all at her, she couldn’t lose her again so she settled for the easiest one, “Are you okay?”

“I- ah fuck.” She whispered to herself blurry memories of the night before coming to her. There was a break up, harsh words and bottles upon bottles. She got into a fight, she remembered more as she thought about it. Saw flashes of fists and almost felt the cold water from the gutters outside the bar she was thrown out of it. “Broke up with my girlfriend.” Catra said, her voice just loud enough for Adora to make out the words. She didn’t want to go into details, didn’t want to talk about getting evicted, didn’t want to get into being fired a week ago. She didn’t want to get into all that had led up to last nights breakdown.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

“Yeah well that’s just something people say so let me do my pleasantries.” Adora said offering the other girl a weak smile, “You can freshen up if you want, I think my clothes would fit you if you want to change. We can call a cab or a doctor or,” she stopped and laughed lightly before continuing, “a hairdresser depending on what you want to do okay?” Adora got up from her chair and walked out of the door after receiving a nod of confirmation from the other girl.

She stood at the banister, her hands wrapped tight around the wood as tears rolled down her face. It was definitely Catra, there was no doubt in her mind about it but she had no idea how or why and what hurt so inexplicably bad was the shattered look in the girls eyes. Catra had been the one with eyes that shone like the stars, Adora remembers comparing the stars that fell on her birthday to her best friends eyes. She remembers drawing sparkles inside her eyes every time she drew Catra but now she looked like broken glass. Like a whiskey glass that fell and shattered too delicately, into too many pieces to possibly fix.

Adora stood there for a minute letting the tears fall freely as she held onto the banister as though it was the only thing grounding her to reality. A minute passed, two, three, they felt like lifetimes as she cried. Felt like lifetimes passed, societies rose and crumbled, life went on and death collected but she stayed still at the wooden staircase in the rundown bar she worked at.

Nothing really ever changes.

Adora cooked a breakfast for Catra that day, on the house and she went about her day as the girl walked from the window to the table nearest to the staircase. She would watch Catra while she sweeped and washed the countertop, she would slip her glasses of water when she went too long sitting still and ask her simple questions just to get her moving again. The day went like that and another and another until Catra had been at the bar for a week, she drank her weight in alcohol every night and Adora carried her up to bed every night. Adora listened to her cry drunkenly about lost love and confess that she’s never felt like home until Adora while she brushed her hair and tucked her into bed. Adora cried every night for a week wishing Catra would talk to her when her blood wasn’t pumped full of alcohol.

It was at the end of the third week when Adora dropped a glass and cut her hand trying to pick it up that Catra spoke to her. She heard the girl cry out and rushed to her side as if on instinct to protect the one that protected her. “Are you okay?”

It was the first words that Adora had heard from the smaller girl that wasn’t drowned in booze and slurred all the way to hell and her eyes filled against her wishes. “Just some glass, don’t worry.” She choked out. Adora wanted to get up, she wanted to get off the ground and go clean up her hand but with Catra’s hand on hers, with her so close to her and smelling like soap and burnt wood she couldn’t make her legs move.

“H-here let me.” Catra managed to say and led the girl to a table. She carefully removed the pieces of glass from her hand and placed them on the table before dabbing at the wound with the sleeve of her sweater, well Adora’s sweater. Adora could only watch, she watched the shattered glass eyes as they focused on her wound, she watched the soft movements and warm touches from someone who looked like they where left inside a freezer for too long. All the color Adora once knew to reside inside Catra had drained out leaving her as a frozen body, only a reminder of the girl Adora once knew.

“Where are you from?” Adora asked, she bit her tongue the minute after because the hands that where holding her own retreated and it seemed like the door to that freezer was going to be slammed in her face again, “I’m sorry, you’re just… so familiar.”

“I-it’s okay. I’m from Meraine.” She said, pushing the words out almost, “you seem familiar too.” Catra said as if it physically pained her to say it. “Why do I know you? Tell me why please, every night when I pass out drunk you take me to your room and you brush my hair and tuck me in. You hold my hand until I fall asleep and you stroke my hair when I cry. How do I know you, why does my heart beat so fast around you and why does it stop when you leave? Why did the emptiness inside stop feeling so empty all of a sudden. Who are you and why did you do what nothing else could?” Catra begged, she was no longer asking or trying to find answers she was begging.

Catra had gone years feeling empty inside her heart, feeling as though she was torn from someone that made her whole and now around this strange girl with a nose that was powder puff pink without blush she felt herself close up again. She felt herself become a whole person, one that did not feel empty, one that felt like she was living in her own time, as though this life was one she was meant to live.

“I know you… or- or at least I knew you.” Adora replied, trying her best to make sense of the situation. She stumbled over the thousands of words that rushed past her mind and to the tip of her tongue all waiting to spill out and find a home inside Catra’s mind but she held it back. She gripped the side of the table with her injured hand and as the wood pierced into the open wound she found her moment of clarity, “I knew you in another life but I buried you. They told you me you died when the bombs hit, your family never made it out so we buried you on the beach we would hide seashells in. We never found a body so we buried your dress and a picture, my favorite picture. Catra we buried you.” Adora said her voice tight and pained. She was bleeding too much, it was dripping out of her and pooling near her feet but somehow the sobs she heard from the other girl was worse.

The breathy sobs that made their way through her entire body, making her double over and cry out, screaming to be let out hurt Adora more. She sat there listening to the girl cry and cry as if every horrible thing that could happen was happening to her, as though she was reliving the moment when the bomb hit, when she was torn away from her mother and her body vaporized again and again. She cried for hours that, she cried and the blood dried up but her cheeks never caught up, when she stopped her eyes looked worse than before. Broken, shattered, these where words that could no longer describe the look in Catra’s eyes. Adora saw the heartbreak in her eyes as if asking her why she would ever tell Catra about the past. She seemed to be asking Adora how she could be so cruel, so heartless as to let her know that she was a dead child. A new person but the same dead child.

Catra left the table that day wordlessly. She went upstairs and it would be many hours until Adora found the courage to go upstairs to find her friend again but she was long gone. During the chaos of the night shift she had gone and left a single piece of paper behind. 

“I’ll find you again.”


End file.
